Show HN: Gridspot, 10x cheaper cloud compute using distributed computing

From [1] - "Our users volunteer their idle compute resources because they want to be part of something valuable to the world. We believe that this is a motivator far more powerful than paying people a small amount of money every month.".

Yeah, I don't think that is going to work, especially because you are for-profit organization not SETI

[1] - https://gridspot.com/gridspot_safe

This is brilliant...I am glad someone finally ran with it. I wrote a blog post about this almost 2 years ago - http://marcgayle.com/2010/01/08/a-legal-botnet-billion-dolla...

There are many applications for this - including fighting DDOS attacks. There are still huge technical challenges with that particular application, but as I understand it...the only way to fight a DDOS is to a) get bigger guns, or b) lie down and take your raping.

Having something like this, can (in theory) give you bigger guns.

Do you guys pay the people who have idle resources?

There's a surprising behavioral economics result that says people will do things for free that they won't do for small amounts of money. A check in the mail for a dollar or two every month isn't as compelling as being part of a group effort.

And empirically, it seems to be working. The number of contributing machines is currently in the six figures. The main risk right now is on the demand side, i.e. whether or not people want this type of compute.

Why would people contribute? You're basically profiting off donated energy. I doubt that's a sustainable model.

An obvious way to do this is how consumers can upload solar power to the grid, and it comes off their bill.

With enough people involved, the compute version of this could be self-sustaining, and the infrastructure guys just take a wee percentage. They are unlikely to be replaced by purely free infrastructure, because money is involved (even if in the form of credits). If there was a shortage at particular time, some people might supply that themselves, for extra cash. Distributed compute supply = local compute supply, with latency advantages.